Theories of cultural and aesthetic postmodernism relied heavily on irony as a master trope. Today, however, in numerous arts fields, we see a re-engagement with irony, and in fact, a shift to discussing dialogics as a planetary arts movement. But what exactly does it mean to talk about tropes such as irony and operations such as dialogue as markers of an aesthetic zeitgeist? And if we are indeed moving from one to the other in the contemporary arts, then what exactly is the relation between irony and dialogue? How did we get from one to the other, if indeed we did so, and what is the import of this shift for contemporary narrative studies?
Amy Elias is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research interests range through narrative theory, time and history studies, media studies, and post-1960s aesthetics and art criticism. Her book Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001) won the Perkins Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and she is a founder of A.S.A.P.: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Her current work includes two co-edited collections and a monograph on dialogics in the contemporary arts.
